Study Says Number Of Obese People Is Rising

More than 300,000 people die each year in the United States from medical problems caused by excess weight.

About 58 million people - nearly 35 percent of the country - are considered obese, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Obesity has increased by nearly 10 percent since the 1980s, according to a study done by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"There are more obese people now than 15 years ago," said Sharry Alpert, spokesperson for Jewish Memorial Hospital in Boston, which has a program to treat obese patients. "There is a huge obesity epidemic."

In the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter of all Americans were obese.

Obesity is defined as 20 percent above ideal body weight.

Obesity can create a multitude of medical problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes, breathing difficulties and heart attacks.

In November 1994, scientists discovered a gene that contributes to obesity. People who are severely overweight sometimes have a gene that distrupts the signal to the brain, telling it that the body has stored enough food.

It is unclear how many people there are like Carol Haffner, who died of morbid obesity on Thursday. Haffner weighed 1,023 pounds.

Morbid obesity is defined as being 100 percent overweight. Women who weigh well over 300 and men who weigh over 400 are considered to suffer from morbid obesity.

The Guinness Book of World Records says the world's heaviest man was Jon Brower Minnoch (1941-83) of Bainbridge Island, Wash. Doctors estimated that he probably weighed more than 1,400 pounds.

Walter Hudson, of Long Island, N.Y., who was officially weighed at 1,400, died in December 1991.